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Who is Prabha Atre?
Dr Prabha Atre is a renowned Indian classical vocalist. She is one of the oldest practitioners from the Kirana Gharana that is among the most prominent lineages of classical music in the country, among its doyens being Bharat Ratna Bhimsen Joshi.
Prabha Atre also excels as an academician, researcher, composer, author, guru and reformer. Atre, trained in Kathak dance style, has also been a pioneer in popularising Indian classical music in the west, giving her first performance in 1969.
Atre has displayed constant innovation and creative endeavour in the treatment, design and presentation of the musical material with musical genres like -- 'khyaal', tarana', thumri', dadra', natyasangeet, ghazal', and bhajan'.
Atre has displayed constant innovation and creative endeavour in the treatment, design and presentation of the musical material with musical genres like -- 'khyaal', tarana', thumri', dadra', natyasangeet, ghazal', and bhajan'.
Life and education
Prabha Atre was born on September 13, 1932, in Pune. She did her elementary education at Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Music School, holds a doctorate in music and graduate degrees in science and law from the University of Pune. Atre was trained in guru-shishya tradition under music greats like Vijay Karandikar, Hirabai Badodekar and Sureshbabu Mane.
Career
During the initial days of her career, Prabha Atre worked as a singing stage artist and performed at Marathi theatre classics like -- Sanshay-Kallol, Maanaapamaan, Saubhadra and Vidyaharan.
She is actively involved in music-related academic activities such as lec-dems, workshops and seminars and has also been teaching at foreign universities as a visiting professor. She has authored over a dozen books on music in Marathi, Hindi and English.
Her Dr Prabha Atre Foundation aims to promote the cause of Indian classical music and performing arts while her Swaramayee Gurukul at Pune strives to bridge the prevailing gap between the academic institutions and the traditional guru-shishya paramparaa by nurturing talented students into professionals aspiring to take up music as a career.
Atre has also established the "Swarmayee Gurukul" to teach students all over the world in both the traditions - 'guru-shishya parampara' and institutional.
Awards
Prabha Atre was in January 2022 awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the nation's second-highest civilian honour. It's the third in the series, following the Padma Shri in 1990 and the Padma Bhushan in 2002.
Her long list of awards includes Bharat Ratna Pandit Bhimsen Joshi Shashtreeya Sangeet Jeevan Gaurav Puraskar by Maharashtra government; Kalidas Samman award by Madhya Pradesh government; Tanariri Sangeet Samman award by Gujarat government; Mallikarjun Mansur Samman by Karnataka government in recognition of her exceptional creativity, highest artistic excellence, outstanding achievement and distinguished lifetime devotion to music. She has also won the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award.
She has received the 'Indo-American Fellowship' for studying research materials used in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, USA.
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